Carpentaria

By Alison Ravescroft

August 19, 2006 — 10.00am

"ONE EVENING IN THE DRIEST grasses in the world, a child who was no stranger to her people, asked if anyone could find hope. The people of parable and prophecy pondered what was hopeless and finally declared they no longer knew what hope was. The clocks, tick-a-ty tock, looked as though they might run out of time. Luckily, the ghosts in the memories of the old folk were listening, and said anyone can find hope in the stories: the big stories and the little ones in between."

So begins Alexis Wright's new novel, Carpentaria, set in a town called Desperance up in the Gulf country, and among its pages are big stories and little ones, with hope nestled among their strangeness and beauty and modern-day terrors. A woman called Hope is dropped from a helicopter into the sea. Can the stories go on after this?

Imagine Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea but make it decidedly contemporary, Australian and funny. Then, if you can, turn it around again and imagine that the old man is an Aboriginal man with the powers to navigate the seas, read the stars, and move with great bodies of water. This old man is Norm Phantom, a man wise in matters of the sea but sometimes foolish when it comes to love.

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Norm is also a taxidermist in his spare time, giving flesh and colour to dead things, making giant prawns and barramundi live forever. His wife is Angel Day, so beautiful that the biggest men hold on to her skirts, begging for freedom but really asking to be always entrapped by her - so beautiful that on the rare days that she smiles she makes Mona Lisa look like a sour lemon.

Then there is Mozzie Fishman, "with the Clint Eastwood face . . . standing tall in an ancient pair of dusty R.M. Williams boots". There is Elias Smith, a white man who walked into Desperance from the sea with no memory and no name; there is a town mayor called Bruiser; and a local policeman who goes by the name of Truthful.

And casting its darkness and false hope over this scene is the mining company, Gurfurrit, with which the young Will Phantom is engaged in mortal combat.

The novel starts slowly and winds itself up into a fast story of violence and murder, little Aboriginal boys flogged by Bruiser and who then, with no hope, hang themselves in their cells. It is a story of old conflicts over land and belonging. But it is always a story of hope, enduring and enigmatic.

This is the kind of writing in which a reader can put their entire trust in the narrator, put the weight of their doubt in the narrator's hands. It is like being spoken to by someone with a voice you can trust, someone standing close by. It is as if you could hear their intake of breath, the compassion in their voice, their amusement at the foolishness of mortals. In Wright we have a writer who is working with the question of the oral and the written word and has come up with a grammar, punctuation and sentence construction that is of someone telling a story. Of all this novel's wonderful inventions, the narrator may be the most remarkable.

Carpentaria is a big book, more than 500 pages, big enough to enter a world, to feel as if you once lived in a town called Desperance.